Scathing remarks

This is a copy of a post I put on my own blog, this morning, but it's mention of 'missional' makes it relevant for this blog as well. 

A friend of mine, Lynne Baab, has recently brought out a new book entitled, Joy Together: Spiritual Practices for Your Congregation.  The focus is on ways to use the well-known spiritual disciplines or practices of the Christian church in groups, or even with full congregations.

This is an interesting take on the disciplines, which have certainly been used communally at many times in their history, and it's good that Lynne has brought them back into focus in this way again.  I haven't finished the book yet, though I'm getting close, but I just wanted to make a comment on the section I was reading this morning, which is about Hospitality.  Some might not regard hospitality as a Christian discipline, any more than they might consider the first item on Lynne's list, Gratitude, to be one.   Be that as it may, both are in the book, and both need discussing in terms of our Christian lives.  (This is not to say that people of other religions, or those who don't believe in any god at all, are never grateful or hospitable.  The focus of the book is on these things from a Christian point of view.)

One thing struck me this morning in the section on hospitality.  It came out of this passage on pages 124-5.

Holding a coffee hour before or after a worship service provides perhaps the most basic opportunity for hospitality.  Recently my students engaged in a spirited online discussion about the role of coffee hour in a missional focus for a congregation.  They had scathing remarks for the poor-quality coffee and cookies that are so often offered at coffee hour.  Several of them said that we talk in Christian circles about Jesus' abundant welcome, and then we provide mediocre food and drink at coffee hour, a cognitive dissonance that does not exactly welcome the stranger. 

I stopped reading at this point.  Now, Jesus certainly talks about abundance, but while he was on earth I don't think there was any point in the many meals he shared with other people when he stopped and said, Look, I can't drink this coffee, or eat these cookies (biscuits, depending on the translation).  It's substandard.  I'm the King of Kings, for goodness' sake.  Are you seriously giving me coffee that tastes like dishwater and cookies that look as though one of the kids threw them together while they were playing on their iPhone?

My sense is that Jesus wouldn't have fussed about it.  Like Paul, he would have said, I don't speak from want, because I've learned to be content in all sorts of circumstances.  I know how to drink mediocre coffee and crummy biscuits, and I also know how to drink my skim cappuccino freddo and eat my caramel crunch slice; in any and every circumstance I have learned the secret of being filled and going hungry, both of having abundance and suffering need.

I think it was the mention of 'scathing remarks' that really struck me in the students discussion.  There's an element of arrogance here, a middle-class tone that says that proper coffee is more important than hospitality.  For me the cognitive dissonance comes between the students' attitude and the apparent lack of humility.  Surely the coffee and biscuits are merely a means to an end, and that is to relate to the people who might come to the coffee hour.  Perhaps you can agree together that the coffee isn't anything to write home about, and then get onto the more important topic of who that person is that's decided to grace your coffee hour by drinking your mediocre coffee and tired biscuits.  

Seminarians with a little to learn...

Thanks to Yvonne Wilkie....this video should be on all Presbyterian sites/blogs/whatevers...

Book catch-up

Happy New Year...belatedly.

For those who still catch up on the occasional posts that appear here, I thought I'd give a pointer to an interesting post reviewing (mostly in brief) a bunch of books that the reviewer thought worthy of commendation from his past year's reading.

Byron Borger (I think that's the person who's written the post) runs a Christian bookshop in Dallastown, Central Pennsylvania; it's nominally Presbyterian, but like OC Books (which also began life as a Presbyterian bookshop) he's wide open to Christians of all denominations.  However, this isn't a plug for the shop, but for the books he's commending in his post, which has been done in something of a rush by the look of it, as there are a number of typos scattered throughout (!)

Be that as it may, this list is well worth checking up on, because even if you don't go as wholeheartedly for the whole collection as he does.  There are several books in the list that I've either had my eye on for a while or now plan to get - pensioner's finances willing - and I'm sure you'll find something of interest there too.

N T Wright makes the cut (dare I say, of course) as does Rob Bell (though it seems that the study guide to Love Wins may be even more interesting than the original book, given its list of contributors).   Abraham Kuyper gets a look in twice, Richard Mouw is there, Tim Keller, Philip Jenkins, Craig Bartholomew, Walter Brueggemann, Scot McKnight, and Richard Hays.

Then there are a bunch of authors whose names I don't know (I might if I was still running the bookshop!) but whose books look very intriguing, and there's a variety of publishing houses, well-known and unknown.   The range of topics is broad, and there should be at least one book to satisfy every taste - for me there'd be far more than one book.

Here's the link: Hearts & Minds Bookstore

Fourth post from Bradley Wright

Bradley Wright's been posting on the subject of why people leave church, and for some reason I managed to miss noting the fourth post in this series.   (Fourth and last, by the looks of it.)

In this one he discusses the relative unimportance of non-Christians' influence in regard to a Christian leaving church.  Very occasionally the influence of a non-Christian will cause a Christian to leave the church and/or faith.   But it's by no means as frequent an occurrence as you might think.  

It's a somewhat different story after the Christian has left the church.   Then there is a stronger tendency for non-Christians to support those who left.  

Which seems reasonable enough.

Don’t Be an Ekklesaphobe

David Fitch in full flight on getting a proper balance between what's wrong with the church...and what's right with it....

It happens on facebook when I give the slightest indication the church is God’s instrument in the world. It happens frequently when I am speaking and assert that God has empowered the church to extend Christ’s presence in the world. It happens when I coach church planters that are missionally oriented and ask them when they gather for worship. It happens when I engage my missional friends on one of the variants of the formula “missiology precedes ecclesiology.” It happens each time I meet someone who has been abused by the traditional church. Each time there is a out-sized reaction against organizing people into practices traditionally associated with being the church (this is especially true of the public worship gathering, or the ordination of clergy).


See the rest of his blog post here. 

Vocations and leavers

Two more items in the occasional posts to this blog...

Jason Goroncy alerted me to a post by Michael Jinkins that asks the question; “What sustains you in your vocation?”

Jinkins begins by noting: 
John Calvin believed that it is the vocation itself, the fact of having been called by God which sustains us. That’s a great response, and I’m sure it is true. But, in the day-to-day slog and grind of living our vocations, beyond the assurance that we are where God called us (which is no small thing!), are there other things that sustain us? Prayer, regular Bible study, worship, the practice of Sabbath?  [I'm currently reading, at long last, Eugene Peterson's Working the Angles - it relates strongly to this question.]

The second item is the third post by Bradley Wright and his research team on the question of why people leave church.  In this post he asks, Does Christians’ bad behavior cause people to leave the faith?
This is a very useful series of posts, asking the right questions, attempting to find some answers - and of course, as always, the comments are as interesting as the posts themselves.

Second post on leaving church

Bradley Wright recently uploaded his first post about why people leave church.   The second is available today.  

If the first seemed obvious, in some ways, the second is the same.   The first related to people who had intellectual problems with their faith, and were asking questions that in fact have been asked for ever - and often answered reasonably adequately. 

The second group are those who say because God hasn't answered their prayers therefore He either doesn't exist or isn't what He says he is, or doesn't keep His promises.   Wright has an interesting comment on this:

I am struck by how much these accounts resonate with sociological theories of human relationships, especially those coming from social exchange theory. This theory describes humans as judging the value of relationships in terms of costs and benefits. One variation of social exchange theory, termed equity theory, holds that people are satisfied with their relationships when they get the rewards that they feel are proportional to the costs that they bear. An inequitable is unstable, and it usually occurs because a person thinks they receive too little for how much they give.

These blog posts are worth keeping in mind; they may explain many of the issues that people in your congregation have with God, and/or church. 

Leaving Church? Why?

Two blog posts about why people are leaving church have turned up this week, and it's worth noting them here as part of an ongoing conversation about the question: Why are people leaving the church (in 'droves' as one of these writer's notes). 

The first blogger is Joshua Graves - he's the preaching and teaching minister for the Otter Creek Church in Nashville, Tennessee.  One of his points is: Church and community are very difficult. Church is a great idea until people get involved. Bonhoeffer consistently warns us in his various writings that we destroy community when we try and create it. Meaning–community, in and of itself, cannot be the goal. Rather, community is the space in which we communally seek to experience the resurrected Jesus. That being said, anyone who’s been a part of a church community knows that relationships will suffer, endure disappointment because this is true in any community...

He has more to say on the topic. but the following paragraph perhaps sums it up: I think the real cause of disillusionment with church is self-disappointment. Pain birthed anger, now solidified in cynicism and apathy (funny how those two always go together). Frustration with “the church” is first about frustration with self. We tend to, in the wisdom of Donald Miller, judge others based on actions while judging ourselves based upon our intent. We are harder on “the church” so we can be “easier” on ourselves. This is why some Christians literally demand more from their church than they do from their own family, their own personal lives (money, time, etc.).

The whole post is called Leaving Church?

The other post is from Bradley Wright, whom I've mentioned on several occasions on this blog.   In a post called, Why do Christians leave the faith? the fundamental importance of apologetics.  Wright begins his post by writing: Several colleagues and I recently finished a study of why Christians leave the faith, and we were surprised at what made a difference as well what didn’t seem to matter. 

The post begins in outlining the sociological aspects of their study (and this post is the first of several that will be appearing) but it soon gets onto looking at some of the reasons people bring forward for why they left the church.   For Wright, many of them hinge on a lack of understanding of apologetics, which of course basically goes back to a lack of understanding of the Bible and God Himself.